When asked why he preferred to live in Tuscany, Italy, Jeffrey Smart answered; Well, “living in Adelaide was no laughing matter.”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-21/australian-born-artist-jeffrey-smart-dies-in-italy/4770682
Vale Jeffrey Smart
21 Friday Jun 2013
Posted in Uncategorized
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
One of the Emmlets studied Jeffrey Smart for her HSC Art, so we had a kind of family immersion. It were grand. He had a wonderful architect’s eye and I can think of none better at composition and colour.
Helvi, I think you might be on to something, fleeing to Tusacany as an Abbotian refugee. No that could be only consolation of a Libnat win.
Adelaide. I spent six weeks there in the late 1980s on an assignment when I was working for a chartered accounting firm. At the time, said Emmlet was about a month old ad her mum brought her down to North Adelaide where I had a rented flat. It was a red hot summer and we spent every moment that I was not at work in the pool or at the beach. The firm offered me a job in Adelaide (and they were laying off staff in Sydney after the flow on from the 1987 stock market crash). We considered it for while (housing dirt cheap by Sydney standards, relaxed lifestyle), but we had a new baby, no family and no social support and the opportunity o make a go of it as a consultant in IT was limited by the tiny SA market for consulting services. Adelaide had no other major appeal beyond the Barossa and Maclaren Vale that we could see, and the idea that one couldn’t – or shouldn’t drink the water was scary – stuck between the edge of a desert and the sea – so we declined the job offer.
Of course, we do have friends in Adelaide now, and I think it’s a great place to visit.
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More than any other Australian painter, Jeffrey Smart has explored the aesthetics of our modern, constructed world. Born in Adelaide in 1921, he recalled: In my early 20s I decided Id painted my last billabong scene forever.1 He instead devoted himself to painting images unique to our time: highways, airports, apartment blocks and factories. Smart asks us to look again at such prosaic subjects and to consider the possibility of discovering a new form of beauty in them. As he said:
I like living in the twentieth century to me the world has never been more beautiful. I am trying to paint the real world I live in, as beautifully as I can, with my own eye.2
1 Jeffrey Smart, quoted in Janet Hawley, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 August 1996.
2 Jeffrey Smart, quoted in Jeffrey Smart retrospective, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2000, p20.
Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 2010
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There are many great artists in the cities, in small rural towns, in the bush all over Australia whose talents should be acknowledged and celebrated by people everywhere.
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Can anybody imagine Adelaide fifty-years ago?
I was in high school in Adelaide in the early seventies. I had to go and watch a play in a theatre with the other students from my English class. It was a Sunday afternoon. When I walked into the foyer, suddenly, I felt different. I felt out of place and embarrassed. I was the only one with a jacket and a tie. The rest were sporting shorts and thongs. They mocked me .. a little 🙂
Jeffrey was right.
RIP J.Smart
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I spent a fair bit of time there as grandparents lived in Adelaide as well as aunts and uncles. Never taken to the CBD, just Glenelg beach and some suburbs. It was okay from my point of view. Just seemed hot and flat. Much better place to visit in the 80s.
I too love Smart’s art.
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I spent a few days in Adelaide at a Scout Jamboree in 1973 and have visited on a few other times. Excitement wasn’t a word that I’d use about Adelaide, though I thought Glenelg was nice.
There is something about Smart’s art, it captures the inane and makes it interesting. Vale
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Vivienne, Algernon, They ruined Glenelg since then. They built a HUGE hotel and apartment complex right on the shore line where the large car park area used to be next to the Sturt River outlet. …And the people just kept quiet. Have a look at the-end-of Anzac Highway with Google Map & Street view.
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Just had a gander – bloody awful and so out of place. Hard to believe. What a shocker. I was there in the 90s with daughters. Caught the tram and walked up and down and dipped in the beach etc. Geez – totally disgusting.
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I love his paintings, and he certainly had a sense of humour as well. Lucky Jeffrey, fifty years living in Tuscany, no wonder he lived so long…Thinking about the Abbott possibility, makes we want to ‘do jeffrey’… to live in Tuscany…sigh.
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An amazing creative Australian. He should be revered much more than Ponting. Why isn’t he?
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Because we prefer to have the myth of a ‘warrior class/culture’ rather than art.
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…“living in Adelaide was no laughing matter.”
🙂
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Lovely !
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a blast from the past
……………………
Vanstone whisked to Tuscan tuition
by: Natasha Bita, Rome
From: The Australian
June 18, 2007 12:00AM
AMANDA Vanstone jetted into sunny Rome yesterday and headed straight for the hills of Tuscany to prepare for her new role as ambassador to Italy.
Ms Vanstone, the controversial former immigration minister who quit the Senate in April after being ditched from cabinet last year, will spend two weeks learning Italian in the renaissance town of Montepulciano before starting work as the ambassador on July 2.
Embassy staff in Rome had to pull strings to have Ms Vanstone’s agrement – a diplomatic term for approval from the Italian Government – finalised just days before her arrival.
She touched down in Rome the morning after Italian politicians, foreign diplomats and expatriate business chiefs attended a farewell reception for serving ambassador Peter Woolcott, a career diplomat who has been recalled to Canberra eight months early to make way for Ms Vanstone.
Mr Woolcott did not greet his replacement at Rome’s airport, where other embassy staff assisted their new boss.
The chauffeur loaded Ms Vanstone’s four pieces of luggage into a silver Mercedes diplomatic van, before whisking her straight to Tuscany.
Ms Vanstone avoided the waiting media by leaving through a different exit.
She will spend the next fortnight in language training, costing about $2652, in the hilltop Tuscan town renowned for fine Vino Nobile wine, sheep’s cheese, pork products and fresh pasta.
Other Australian diplomats have attended the town’s Il Sasso language school, which offers intensive tuition of six hours a day in group and private lessons.
“Even if you come to Montepulciano to learn Italian, you will probably not want to pass all your time doing exercises and reading grammar books!” the school’s website says.
“The school offers its students the chance to pass their afternoons together through a wide variety of excursions and activities – guided tours, wine, olive oil and cheese tastings, cooking lessons, walks in the country.”
Once Ms Vanstone moves into the $11.2million ambassador’s residence in Rome – a four-level mansion with a swimming pool, terraces and a turret – she will have the services of a chauffeur, gardener, butler, maid and chef.
On top of her salary, Ms Vanstone will earn an overseas allowance, a transfer allowance and a clothing allowance – the same conditions given to Mr Woolcott.
She has been on the taxpayers’ payroll since May 8, when she was employed as a public servant under an Australian Workplace Agreement.
……………………….
A. Vanstone is also from Adelaide. I wonder what Italians thought of her. 🙂
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I suspect something out of Mad Max.
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Wonderful, I’m laughing out loud by now (very loud, and Milo looks at me, asking: What’s that funny) I remember Mr Woolcott, an elegant ,sophisticated man…
Thank you , Natasha Bita and you ,hph…some story this is.. 🙂
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Mandy was one of the better Liberals I thought. Not an ambassador just a pollie on a tax payer funded junket. About as much dress sense as a brick. Woolcott on the other hand was a diplomat
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Alge, I too quite like Amanda, she’s not pretentious, I’m sure the Italians liked her common touch. Another one of course is Judy Moylan, and the Greek guy…whose name I can’t think right now.
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I don’t mind the moderates of the Liberal party, they have a conscience generally that the conservatives don’t. Unfortunately the conservatives have purge most of them and the Liberal (surely and oxymoron in itself) are further to the right than ever. This current lot would be comfortable with the likes of Mussolini or Hitler.
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They should have sent Amanda to Palermo, Sicilia. 🙂
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Amanda blows hot and cold. Can be nasty and nice. But she was a tad too liberal for the Liberals (not).
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Who else is from Adelaide? …hmmmm… oh yes! Cory Bernardi and Christopher Maurice Pyne
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Oh yes man who marries sheep and a poodle.
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Many well-known Australians come from Adelaide, one of my favourite of modern writers J M Coetzee, originally from South Africa, now lives in Adelaide.
The journalist Christopher Pearson, who died recently, also originated from there.
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I understand J M Coetzee, but I hope Pearson wasn’t one of your favorite journalist. 🙂
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…sss.
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He wrote for The Australian, say no more…
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We all seem to expect people to live forever. We are privileged to have known his art. Thank you for posting this, Gerard.
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